The Other One — Berlin Series

Rendering of six dark grey cylinders standing on a dark ground, the two in front the nearest, each cut with its own pattern of grooves and blocks — *The Other One — Berlin Series*, 2026 — six sculptures, rendered. Courtesy of the artist

Year: 2026
Medium: Performance, biometric sensing, 3D printing
With: Elana Katz
Signal: EDA, ECG, EMG, EEG, four channels
Printer: BambuLab H2D
Each object: Cylinder, ø 57 × 108 mm
Edition: 12 × unique
Exhibited: The Other One — Berlin, Galerie KWADRAT, 14 March – 11 April 2026
Supported by: Goethe-Institut International Coproduction Fund; coproduced with Galerie KWADRAT, Boston University College of Fine Arts and the Boston Public Art Triennial
Continued from: The Other One — Boston Series, 2025

The Other One at Galerie KWADRAT is the second edition of a two-part project by HEW (House for the End of the World), which premiered at the Goethe-Institut Boston in October 2025. Through live performance, sculpture and sound installation, its artworks confront the notions of distortion, dependency and displacement. The work of Elana Katz and Dario Srbić answers with a fear they both have, the fear of heights, and with what it does to a body on a ladder.

The packed gallery on the opening night: visitors pressed along the brick wall and into the doorway, a man in a black beanie speaking with a notebook in his hand, the printer among them — *The Other One — Berlin Series*, 2026 — the evening of 14 March. Photo: © Galya Feierman

The gallery is small, and its ceiling spans two floors. A ladder is installed between them, leading up to an opening just under the roof, and a 3D printer stands in the room: two juxtaposed objects dominating the space, with the audience between them. On the evening of 14 March 2026 the space is so packed that people watch from outside. Katz, electrodes on her temple and her neck and the sensors on her back, makes the durational commitment to go up and down this ladder for one hour, to confront her own fear of heights; to confront the fear of falling. She climbs to the roof timbers, lies along a beam, grips a rung and looks over it at the people below. The printer and her body perform in dialogue, two instruments registering the same experience, and that evening the first sculpture is made among the visitors, who lean over the machine as it works. For the weeks of the exhibition the raw footage of the performance plays on an iPad in the ladder, and the printer goes on.

Katz on hands and knees along a beam under the black roof timbers, electrode leads trailing from her neck — *The Other One — Berlin Series*, 2026 — Elana Katz. Photo: © Galya Feierman

Visitors crowded round the printer by the brick wall, one bent over the machine to look inside — *The Other One — Berlin Series*, 2026 — the evening of 14 March. Photo: © Galya Feierman

She goes up and down; the groove only goes up. The printer builds the cylinder from the bottom, layer by layer, as she climbs rung by rung, and on its surface every descent of hers is cut as ascent: the sculptures become physical maps of the space between the ladder's bottom and top, between fear and its confrontation. A ladder has fixed rungs. The groove is a ladder wound round a cylinder, and its rungs move: in fear, time passes slowly, the spirals come closer to each other, and the sculpture takes longer to build. This is the distortion. The dependency is between the two instruments, since the printer takes longer when she hesitates, and the displacement is the height itself, two floors of a house in Kreuzberg carried over into 108 mm.

Seen from above through the opening under the roof: Katz climbing up towards the camera, her hands on the top rung, the gallery floor two storeys below — *The Other One — Berlin Series*, 2026 — Elana Katz. Photo: © Galya Feierman

Katz from behind, kneeling at the top of the ladder under the roof timbers and reaching up, the sensor box with its leads on her back — *The Other One — Berlin Series*, 2026 — Elana Katz. Photo: © Galya Feierman

To capture fear, and not arousal, takes more than one channel. The Boston edition measured electrodermal activity (EDA) alone, because the goal there was to capture arousal, without distinguishing whether that is fear or excitement. Berlin adds multi-modality, capturing the heart (ECG), the muscles (EMG) and the brain (EEG) to distinguish the fear: her sweat, heartbeat, brainwaves, muscles, anchored by the collarbone. The interface grew with it. It shows the tensor, twelve values from the level of skin conductance to the engagement of the brain, the spiral path seen from above, as one looks down a ladder, and the five stages the signal passes: acquisition, analysis, transform, generating, fabrication. In Berlin the recordings are kept, because a performance, once recorded, can return as new sculptures.

The Visceral Cuts interface at acquisition, reading a recorded session from the archive: four orange traces, EDA, ECG, EMG and EEG — *The Other One — Berlin Series*, 2026 — the interface, acquisition. Courtesy of the artist

The Visceral Cuts interface at transform: twelve tensor values as bars on the left, on the right the spiral path seen from above, dense orange rings — *The Other One — Berlin Series*, 2026 — the interface, transform. Courtesy of the artist

Five cuts answer the signals: the depth of the groove, its width, its height, the gap to the next groove and the pitch of the spiral. Arousal deepens the cut. Calm widens it. A burst in the muscles raises it. Sustained tension closes the gap between one groove and the next, slowly and then in a sudden collapse, until the grooves merge into a continuous band: the inscribed surface of fear. And fear lowers the pitch, so that the spirals tighten and come closer to those of Edison's cylinders.

The Visceral Cuts interface at generating: the five cuts, depth, width, height, gap and pitch, as bars, and a preview of the cylinder built of blocks — *The Other One — Berlin Series*, 2026 — the interface, generating. Courtesy of the artist

Twelve sculptures come out of the hour. Six read it through the classical language of the body, the psychophysiology of fear. Six more follow from the same recorded signals, a human-AI interpretation made for the conditions of the 3D print, which is rough where a rendering is exact: a nozzle cannot print what a screen can show, so the figural is adjusted to what emerges in the material, the same hour cut differently each time.

Rendering of a dark grey cylinder on a dark ground, its grooves broken near the rim into bands and rows of blocks — *The Other One — Berlin Series*, 2026 — the first sculpture, rendered. Courtesy of the artist

The same cylinder printed in black on a white plinth against a brick wall, its spiral groove dense and nearly even from foot to rim — *The Other One — Berlin Series*, 2026 — the first sculpture, printed. Courtesy of the artist

Each cylinder is a holder, a record of an inner state deduced from biometric signals, as Edison's cylinders held music, and it has their size, 57 mm across and 108 mm high. What these twelve hold is one hour of the fear of heights, accumulated as continuous topography, each revolution recording another moment of the performer's body meeting its threshold.

The Other One — Berlin Series

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